Wednesday, February 27, 2008

The Terminator Cometh

Increasingly autonomous, gun-totting robots developed for warfare could easily fall into the hands of terrorists and may one day unleash a robot arms race, a top expert on artificial intelligence told AFP. "They pose a threat to humanity," said University of Sheffield professor Noel Sharkey ahead of a keynote address Wednesday before Britain's Royal United Services Institute.

But what led Dr. Sharkey to become concerned? Perhaps this 2005 interview holds a clue:

It was while reflecting on the effects of an acid trip (he had taken LSD) that he began wondering about the limits of the mind. Since then he has explored the nature of machine intelligence, experimented with robotic evolution and mused on what kind of thinking is beyond computers.